Scraps Demo

Sandbox games are usually extremely popular, since they allow the players to express their creativity by themselves. Thus, titles like Minecraft and even Grand Theft Auto enjoy massive levels of popularity and they only continue to grow, since all they have to do is wait for more people to find out about them and include a few new tools from time to time, at least in Minecraft’s case.

Scraps is a cute little game that allows you to take things a bit further and come up with a design for your own killing machine, one that can go fast and output a decent number of bullets per second as well. The end goal is to use your creation in multiplayer matches against other players, in order to put it to the test and see whether it can match up with the rest of the vehicles.

However, the demo at hand only contains the vehicle creation tool and a test map to see how it fares out on the road, but you cannot actually use the weapons on anything as of yet. The number of components is still rather limited when it comes to the chassis and the cockpit, even if they are certainly not the elements that interest you the most when you start piling up engines and laser guns.

Speaking of which, the weapons are quite powerful and they vary in size, which means that you need to contemplate on whether you want to go faster, or hit harder, because you can rarely have both of them. Each weapon needs energy to function, which is provided by yet more generators and capacitors you must carry on board. Thus, the final equation must include a lot of factors and it is very difficult to obtain the right balance.

Physics-wise, the simulation is quite nice and accurate enough not to raise any eyebrows, although you cannot lose parts and the components simple explode if they receive too much damage. Thus, no matter how hard you crash against a wall, the vehicle remains as it was, unless one of the parts hitting the wall is too damaged from before. The suspension simulation is quite nice, although not very accurate and sometimes a bit annoying.

In the end, Scraps must still go a long way in order to become something playable, but it is definitely on the right track. The fun factor is already there, because you can spend a few hours coming up with the desired design and stress-testing it out on the track, but things quickly get boring if you cannot put the weapons to the test.